Cherokee Legends and the Trail of Tears T. Underwood with Amanda Crowe (1956)

Cherokee Legends and the Trails of Tears
Adapted by Thomas Bryan Underwood
Cover design and illustrations by Amanda Crowe
S. B. Newman Printing Co.
Knoxville, TN
(c)1956

Next to the deplorable history that the United States has with it's slave population (a history still being rewritten and re-fought) is the even more deplorable history that the United States does not accurately teach and all too quickly dismisses: how the Europeans stole the very land that makes the United States from the Natives who were here for hundreds if not thousands of years before. One of the most painful episodes of that long and terrible conflict was the "Trail of Tears", the forced relocation of entire tribes of Natives to what would eventually become Oklahoma by order of Andrew (the Indian Killer) Jackson.

This 32 pages booklet adds to the tears. Adapted by T. B. Underwood from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, this telling account of the Trail is based on the first-hand witness Private John G. Burnett, Captain Abraham McClellan's Company, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade, Mounted Infantry, Cherokee Indian Removal 1838-39. It is a damning accounting. I had to fight back tears reading of the senseless loss of lives. Manifest Destiny had many victims. Since Natives never really counted in the country from the very beginning (3/5 of a man in census taking)

It's an important document. It should be a MUST read for all students in the United States.